Category: abbeynews

Fr Patrick Hederman OSB

Our Lord, Jesus Christ, when he came on earth used images to explain what he was trying to do for us. These images were taken from the day to day lives of the people with whom he lived. ‘I am the bread of life’ he said; ‘I am the door;’ ‘I am the shepherd;’ ‘I am the gateway.’ If he were here with us today, he might have used more up-to-date imagery to make us understand what is happening.

Instead of ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’ [John 15:5] he might have said: ‘I am the fibre optic splicer.’ Fiber optic splicing is one of the new professions in the telecommunications industry. You join two fibre optic cables together to create a continuous path for data transmission. The cable has at least two flexible fibres with a glass core
through which light signals can be sent. The Splicer makes a permanent connection between cables which allows each one of us to connect into the main branch. This is how we receive digital cable TV on our lap-tops, for instance. It comes through a network of high-speed fibre-optic cables.

Three weeks from today, on the 19 th May, is Pentecost Sunday, the day we welcome the Holy Spirit into our high speed networks. This completes the fibre optic connection between each one of us and the great power station that is the hub of the universe. We can either plug into this system or we can carry on paddling our own canoes. The choice at every stage of the connection is ours.

The second reading this morning gives us a clue: ‘Let us not love with
words or speech but with actions and in truth’ [1 John 3:18]. Let us be down-to-earth and practical as we prepare ourselves for our transfer to broadband. You don’t have to know how it works to find out that it works: just turn it on and benefit from your cable television. ‘We know’ Saint John tells us later on in this same letter, ‘that God lives in us because of the Spirit which God has given us’ [1 John, 3:24]. We all have that Spirit within us, that eternal source of God’s energy and power. All we have to do is activate that presence, by splicing the
fibre optic cables.

St Benedict tells us how to do this in the Prologue to his Rule: ‘whatever good work you undertake, ask him with most instant prayer to bring it to perfection.’ Whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever you hope for, stop for a moment and ask the Holy Spirit to help you. Instantissima oratione is the secret formula of Saint Benedict. Instantissima in Latin is the same word we use for ‘instant coffee’ or ‘instant soup.’ It is instant prayer. You can do it anywhere, at any time, in a couple of seconds; as long as it takes to say ‘I love you, help me.’
And it’s a question of getting into the habit, of going down into yourself and touching base. If someone asks you a question, instead of replying immediately, automatically, ask the Spirit to tell you what to say. The Holy Spirit is the finger of God, the extension of God’s right hand. The Holy Spirit is the Digitus Dei, digital divinity, The Holy Spirit is your ATM, your automated teller machine –telling you whatever you are meant to do; whatever you are meant to say.

If you allow the Holy Spirit to guide you there will be magic in your life ahead. You only have to learn to interpret the coded messages sent your way. These can happen through coincidences which can so easily be shrugged off or overlooked. Other times it is an impulse, sent your way: talk to this person, take down that book, walk in this direction, go into that church now. When we obey, we find that it leads to the unforeseen. The meaning of a particular hunch is often at the other side of our obeying it, of our doing what we are told. I have found that this instantissima oratio is particularly useful when doing examinations. Before even reading the question paper, make sure that the cables are connected and then continue working on evergreen energy.

Try it for yourselves when the Holy Spirit comes.

Abbot Brendan Coffey OSB was invited to deliver the sermon at this year’s Service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving at Trinity College Dublin on the occasion of Trinity Monday 2024.

Trinity Monday has long been a special day in the life of the College as its Honorary Fellows, Fellows and Scholars are announced by the Provost in a ceremony referring back to the foundation of the College in 1592.

After the announcement on the steps of the Public Theatre, the Service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving takes place in the College Chapel and is followed by the Trinity Monday Memorial Discourse in the Graduates Memorial Building.

 

Abbot Brendan preached as follows:

(Check Against Delivery)

Trinity College is a famous place of learning, education and tradition. If you ask anyone in Ireland they will know this. If you mention Trinity College to someone here or abroad, they will also tell you that this is where you go to look at the Book of Kells.

Books, learning and education go together. Wars have been fought over books; they are valuable things. In our digital age we can easily forget that. While some books became works of art and are absolutely exquisite, most were primarily books: storing information, learning and wisdom. In the past books were comparatively rare and people only wrote things down if what they had to say was worth writing down. Perhaps we could learn something from that today, starting with my sermon.

Reading a book is one thing, understanding what you read is another. Jesus was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and he found the place where it is written “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” He explained that today this text has been fulfilled in your hearing. Well, that put the cat among the pigeons. They were astonished, outraged actually. They even tried to throw him off a cliff. I don’t think that happens very often after a lecture today? The people of Nazareth reacted like this because he said something that challenged their certainties. He didn’t just repeat the same old, same old, he said something completely new and unexpected. Nobody fell asleep during that sermon.

I am a Benedictine monk and I belong to a monastic tradition going back to the sixth century. Monastics and particularly Benedictine monastics, love books. We are hoarders. You should see the rooms of some of my confrères. Monks have always been like this, they kept everything, especially books; even books they couldn’t read or understand, in the hope that one day someone would come along and help them understand.

These people were open and they didn’t see knowledge as something dangerous or threatening. They didn’t necessarily believe and accept everything that came their way either, as some people seem to do today on social media, they exercised their critical faculties and their discretion. They did, however, value knowledge and believed that all forms of knowledge helped reveal the creator of all things. And so St Anselm could say fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.

It was monastics like this who were responsible for the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the many manuscripts emanating from centres on the continent. These enlightened people valued learning and left us an invaluable legacy. Of course not everyone back then had such an open mind, but there were enough people who had.

Somewhere down the centuries things changed. We became fearful, like the people of Nazareth. Anything that might seem to threaten our narrow world of certainties was pushed off the cliff. Be that Galileo or Oscar Romero. Today, I am sad to say that this attitude is still alive and well. We might have exchanged one set of certainties for another, but very little has really changed. Anyone who challenges the perceived orthodoxy is immediately taken to the edge of the cliff.

How can we learn if we continue like this? Irrational fear lies behind our recent spate of attacks, violence, arson, and xenophobia. In other countries too we see similar patterns, even in the land of the free and home of the brave. This is why true education, learning and knowledge are essential today. Not a knowledge which is closed in its own discipline, but one which is open to all disciplines.

Winston Churchill once said, “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Life should teach us lessons, however, we do not need to fear everything and everyone.

Permit me one example from our monastic past. Hermann of Reichenau, or HermanusContractus, was a fascinating individual. His parents Count Wolverad II and Hiltrud were of a noble family from Upper Swabia. His noble birth probably saved his life as a child, together with the fact that he had very loving parents. He was born 18 July 1013 and died on 24 September 1054. He was extremely disabled from childhood, having only limited movement and limited ability to speak. He had a special chair made for him and he was carried around everywhere in it.

At the age of seven, he was placed in the Benedictine Abbey of Reichenau by his parents who could no longer look after him. After he died he was buried with his mother, because he believed it was she who saved his life as a child. To their eternal credit the monks of Reichenau took him in and looked after him. The island of Richenau was the artistic and literary centre of south-west Germany during this period. This island became Hermann’s entire world. The famous Benedictine Abbey which had been founded there in 724, played an important role in scholarship, since it was a centre where manuscripts were copied.

Hermann was an extraordinary individual who studied under the famous Abbot Berno (about 978-1048) in Richenau. Hermann decided to become a monk in 1043, later, and somewhat amazingly, he was elected Abbot of the Monastery after the death of Abbot Berno on 7 June 1048, at the age of 35. He was Abbot for the last 6 years of his life. Despite his disabilities, being confined to a chair and hardly able to speak, he was a key figure in the transmission of Arabic mathematics, astronomy and scientific instruments from Arabic sources into central Europe. He composed works on history, music theory, mathematics, and astronomy, as well as many hymns. He was the first to make the lunar calendar of the Middle-Ages work, a huge scientific discovery that really changed people’s lives for the better.

There are two things, apart from the obvious, that I greatly admire about Hermann. Firstly, very few people have ever heard of him despite his many claims to fame. He was obviously not interested in the limelight, and, secondly, he lived a very full and by all accounts contented life. He wrote most of his hymns later in life after he went blind, as if he hadn’t a sufficient number of difficulties to contend with.

This is what can happen when enough people keep an open mind. When we are willing to listen to an unexpected teacher in the synagogue in Nazareth. When we engage with the stranger among us and learn new things. When we don’t judge a book by its cover, or a person by the colour of their skin, physical abilities, race, creed or nation.

Let us remember that there were indeed many widows in Israel in Elijah’s day and yet he was sent by God to a Sidonian town to the widow of Zarephath. There were many lepers in Elisha’s day, but it was Naaman the Syrian who was healed. Can we not learn from this and overcome our fear? This is a true education.

– Abbot Brendan Coffey OSB, 22.4.24

Fr Christopher Dillon OSB

A shepherd in Palestine or anywhere in the Middle East manages his sheep very differently from what you might expect of a shepherd in this country. We think of shepherds as driving their sheep, but the Palestinian leads his. He walks ahead of them to guide them to safety and good grazing, keeping an eye out for dogs and wolves and ready to take them on, should they attack. That is the point of the image which Jesus uses of the Good Shepherd. He sees his task as being out there ahead of us, to keep us safe. And not only that; he says, “I lay down my life for my sheep”.

All three readings today talk about God saving us. St Peter in the first reading says of Jesus’ name, “Of all the names in the world given to people, this is the only one by which we can be saved.” St John puts it more mysteriously in the Second Reading, when he says, “all we know is that when the future is revealed, we shall be like him”, that is to say, we shall be like God.

“And what”, you might ask, “do we need to be saved from?” Well, look around you: climate change, wars in Ukraine and Israel, migrants fleeing catastrophes of one kind or another, threats to democracy and sane government, social problems ranging from housing to health services, to say nothing of famine and drought around the world, the mental stress of addiction and loneliness.

There is so much from which people, including us here, need to be saved, to be rescued. And these readings represent the voice of God saying to us, “I love you. You are my children. I will not fail you. I will lay down my life for you.” The Easter story tells us that God, in Jesus Christ, has done just that; he has laid down his life for us, has laid down his life for us and taken it up again. He has taken it up again in such a way that we too can rise to new life after our own death. That is the saving, the rescue that he is speaking about. He is inviting us to put our trust and our hope in his love for us.

That is what our Christian faith is about, believing in God’s love for us. When all else fails, as it will, his love for us is absolute and unconditional. The question for every one of us is, “Do you trust his love?” At the very least, like the father of the sick child whom he brought to Jesus for healing, we can say, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Fr William Fennelly OSB

‘The disciples told their story’, Saint Luke tells us, about what had just happened on the road to Emmaus and about how, at the breaking of bread, they finally recognised that their new companion was Jesus, their Lord. you can almost feel the buzz. You can hear the urgency in their voices telling what they’d seen. And they were so consumed with the business of telling the others, that Jesus comes again and interrupts them mid-flow.

Telling stories about Jesus, sharing news of God’s wonderful works, and witnessing to the Risen Lord remains a vital task for 21st-century disciples as it was two thousand years ago. It’s how the faith was spread, often at great sacrifice and risk, and how it has been handed down through countless generations the world over. In this sharing of the Good News of Jesus Christ, no detail is more important than the Resurrection, not least because, as Jesus says, it fulfils the scriptures.

So, how good are we at engaging in and performing this key resoinsibilty? Have you, for example, radiated some of that same joy of the early disciples as they basked in the light of the Risen Lord? Have you greeted people with the traditional Easter greetings like ‘Christ is risen! Alleluia!’? When was the last time you spoke with friends about an encounter with Jesus like the Emmaus disciples? How many of us see his Holy Spirit as an animating force in our lives? Did you, this Easter, choose the Easter bunny and Easter eggs over the cross? These are searching questions to ask of ourselves.

The Korean German writer, Byung Chul Han, says that  Homo sapiens have degenerated into “phono sapiens”. Storytelling used to bind us together around the campfire; it connected us to our past and helped us imagine hopeful futures. The digital screen has replaced that fire, making us individuals that perform fictitious versions of ourselves to unseen peers, tailoring our looks, lives and opinions to get our story liked. “This smart form of domination constantly asks us to communicate our opinions, needs and preferences, to tell our lives, to post, share and like messages”. Han argues that in a fog of instant information, commodified data, and selfie updates, our ability to tell our stories has degenerated. He surely has a point and the effects of this decline really affect the christian community’s efforts to share its story and encourage each other in the faith. My story seems to be hard to connect to our story as christians.

One issue is ignorance of the story itself. You can’t speak about what you do not know about. ‘Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ’, it is said. Reading scripture and spending time in prayer are humble and faithful slow works of a lifetime, part and parcel of being a disciple.

Another obstacle is of course our sin. Our credibility as storytellers, as sharers of the Gospel, depends on the way we live our lives. People are rightly reluctant to accept the word of a hypocrite, one who says they know Jesus but doesn’t keep his commandments, as the Second Reading put it. Actually, I think few have the brass-neck for such double standards and so the result of sin is not that the Gospel is shared by sinners and is disbelieved, but that it isn’t shared at all for fear of being labelled a hypocrite or judged ourselves. Of course, not one of us is perfect and so failing to proclaim the Lord because of our own shortcomings is a complex but real state of affairs. Happily, there’s a remedy and one that is found in the very thing we seek to proclaim.

When we sin and we all do, we can confess and repent, as St Peter said in the first Reading. We repent knowing of the Lord’s victory over sin and death, confident of his forgiveness for all. As forgiven and redeemed people we can testify to others that we need not be trapped by our faults and vices in an endless cycle of guilt. Moreover, when we seek to avoid sinning, we hold to the ideal of being a genuinely good person on our horizon so that, ‘God’s love can come to perfection’ in us. Only by living God’s love will the Good News be seen for what it is: authentic; compelling; and transformative.

Jesus tells the disciples, as he tells us, in no uncertain terms ‘you are witnesses to this’. So let’s tell his story! Tell his story in your story! And tell the stories well, because salvation depends upon this vital task.

Fr Jarek Kurek OSB

Quite recently the death occurred of a Polish man whose name was Ernest Bryll. He was a well-known writer and poet; a man of wide cultural horizons. He had a particular affection for Irish Culture and because of his love for this country he gave his Polish readers many Irish gems. For instance, he made a translation into Polish of Irish poems from the 6th to the 19th centuries. But also, and I have this book here with me, he left us with a most fascinating account of the
journey he made with his wife across Ireland, a journey that started in Dublin, where the two of them followed the trail of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and continued until they eventually reached Dingle and the Blasket Islands, mapping out for the reader all the cultural phenomena they encountered.

Mr Bryll lived in Ireland, back in the early 90s’, while he was serving as the first Polish ambassador to Ireland. And it was during those years that he had a very memorable encounter with a Polish nun called Sr Faustina Kowalska. Well, like it or not, you are stuck with the Poles today…

To be perfectly honest with you, Mr Bryll, didn’t think too much of Sr
Faustina’s revelations initially. To him they seemed quite odd. But he was lucky enough to be challenged by some Irish people who helped him to appreciate her. He happened to meet a local Irish woman, the owner of the hotel he was staying in, and in that hotel there were some pictures of Sr Faustina and the Divine Mercy. That landlady said to him: ‘You are from Poland, are you not? Tell me everything about this Sr Faustina, because, you know, her revelations are very important to us here in Ireland’. The Ambassador looked at her quite perplexed and thought: ‘What am I supposed to tell her? I don’t really know anything
about them’.

On that occasion he managed to save face by remaining rather vague. However, that conversation made him read up on Sr Faustina and her legacy, to avoid similar future embarrassment. At this stage it was still too soon for him to read the actual Diary containing her revelations and he still maintained a low opinion of these writings. He believed
they were rather chaotic, a folksy text produced by an uneducated nun and not worth his scholarly attention.

It was only some years later that he finally started to seriously explore the spiritual experience of the Diary. Only then did he discover that there was far more to this than he had originally though. This highly educated man humbly admitted to himself that this Diary, so often
unappreciated and ridiculed, could actually have a transformative power on its reader.

And a spiritual transformation is what Ambassador Bryll experienced as he carefully read these pages. This extraordinary man subsequently became a herald and promotor of Divine Mercy. We read in the Diary those powerful words that Jesus spoke to Sr Faustina: ‘I want to give Myself to souls, I yearn for souls, My daughter. On the day of My feast, the Feast of Mercy, you will go through the whole world and bring fainting souls to the spring of My mercy, and I shall heal and strengthen them, amen’.

Fr Senan Furlong OSB

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been … think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first
link on one memorable day.

Great expectations were shattered on the Friday we call good. Jesus’ death on the cross seemed so final, so irrevocable, the erasure of meaning and hope. Things fell apart and those left behind were broken and devastated. The violence of Friday however gave way to the stillness of Saturday and now, it’s early dawn on the first day of the week, the first Easter Sunday. And the first link of the long chain of new life on this one memorable day is an empty tomb.

Sometimes things come along that you didn’t know you needed until you’re offered them. And who would ever have imagined that something as unpromising as an empty tomb would be one of these? On one memorable day three people, one woman and two men came to the tomb where Jesus had been laid. Each came looking for something, not really knowing what that something was.

First came Mary of Magdala, grief stricken and inconsolable. To her horror, she found that Jesus’ body was gone. Then came Peter and the beloved disciple running to the tomb at Mary’s news. Peter did not hesitate to go straight in, but all he could understand then was emptiness: an empty tomb and empty grave clothes. The beloved disciple who outran Peter also entered in. “He saw and he believed.” What he believed is hard to say. Even if he outran Peter in faith, clearly neither of them yet understood what this was all about, for both of them just went home. But Mary, who stood by Jesus as he was dying on the cross, now waited at the tomb in tears; and it is to her that the first link, the empty tomb, yielded up its meaning. Mary is the first to see the Risen Lord. She is first to proclaim, ‘I have seen the Lord.’

We may think we know what we are looking for, hoping to fulfil our great expectations. And then suddenly everything changes: the tomb is empty! Our expectations are shown to be far from great, what we were looking for embarrassingly paltry.

Waiting at the empty tomb like Mary changes us. We seek the Lord only to find that it is the Risen Lord who is seeking us. No matter what we throw at him, however deeply we reject him, however much we seek to bury him, he will find a way back to us. Nothing can separate us from the love of the Lord, not even death itself. This is the story of Easter, this is the story of eternity. Today is the one memorable day that changes the course of our lives and binds us with the long chain of God’s infinite love.

Abbot Brendan OSB

As we listened to the account of God’s dream for the world in the Liturgy of the Word; could you feel the presence of the Risen Lord with us? Has this dream become a reality? The promises made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Elizabeth and Zacheriah, Mary and Joseph, have they come true?

Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome, came to the tomb. St Cyril of Jerusalem calls Mary of Magdala the philochristos – the ‘lover of Christ’. But strong as she was, Mary of Magdala was almost broken as she approached the tomb. It was all too much. She was reduced to misery. Like all the others she misread the situation.

John’s gospel tells us she had been weeping in the garden. This seems to be a human pastime, starting with Adam and Eve. The three women didn’t realise that God’s plan had already become a reality.

These women expected to see a corpse wrapped in a sheet, instead they see a young man dressed in white. They expected to see a body lying in the tomb, instead they see a man sitting on the right: on whose right? Someone placed this young man on his right hand, saying to him: ‘Sit on my right’.  Do we not remember the words of Jesus to the sons of Zebedee, “sitting at my right hand and my left, this is not mine to grant; this is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

“You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth”, said this man dressed in white, “he has risen, he is not here.” The place of deposition bears witness to this. The hour has come when the bridegroom has been taken away, just as he said.

There is one more line in this gospel passage which we never hear, it is always omitted. It says, “And the women came out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and amazement had gripped them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

What an anticlimax! No wonder it’s omitted. They have just been told the most important news in all of history and what do they do? Nothing. They were afraid. I think this verse is actually more for us than for the women disciples.

Are we afraid of Jesus’ resurrection? Are we afraid of proclaiming it? Are we afraid to stand up for what is right and true in the world? Many of us in the church today are so afraid that we don’t even tell ourselves who we are anymore – the disciples of the Risen Jesus.

Yes, the problems of the world have not disappeared and life remains a struggle for many people, but Christ is Risen, the stone is rolled away from the entrance to our tomb, and we are the messengers of this truth.

Have you not heard, this is the night when a tsunami of grace is poured out, as it will be on Carole when she comes before the altar to receive the sacrament of confirmation.

So do not be afraid, listen to the voices of Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Listen to the voices of the peoples of Ukraine. Listen to the suffering people of Gaza and the Middle East. These are the voices crying out to the Risen Christ who stands among us and before whom one day every one of us must stand and ask for mercy. Christ is Risen and it is intolerable in our day that God’s children should be treated like this. Do not be afraid – proclaim the resurrection, proclaim the gospel!

Can you feel the presence of the Risen Christ among us? Can you hear what he is saying to us? We believe in the God of life and “He is going before you to Gallilee, there you will see him.” What shocked the disciples about the resurrection was not just that Jesus rose from the dead; they witnessed this before, Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, and of course, Lazarus. What was so shocking was that the resurrected Jesus did not come back from death as an avenger, but as the bringer of forgiveness. His pierced hand is forever raised against the flames of war, violence and vengeance and he says: Stop! ‘Peace be with you’. Such words break down the gates of hell. These are now our words, if we have the courage to use them.

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! (Khristós Anésti! Alithós Anésti!) Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!